General purpose computer systems of yesteryear were largely limited to the display of textual information. In fact, the early computer displays were incapable of displaying anything other than words, or crude drawings made from text related symbols commonly found on a keyboard, such as ":-)". While text and silly symbols were just fine for some people, many people with expressive personalities wanted the ability to display real graphics on their computer display. Gradually, computer displays started supporting graphics. Early graphics were displayed in what became known as "CGA mode" CGA mode divided the computer display up into rows of 640 pixels and columns of 200 pixels. While images displayed in CGA mode were relatively easy to generate and display since they did not require a tremendous amount of data, the resolution of an image displayed in CGA mode was grainy and only of marginal quality.
Users quickly became dissatisfied with the quality of CGA mode monitors, and began demanding something better. EGA mode increased the resolution of the image to 640.times.350 pixels, but users still weren't very happy.
When VGA mode increased the resolution to 640.times.480 pixels, users started to realize that their computers were now capable of displaying high quality images, either still or animated. This realization opened up a whole new computer market now commonly (if imprecisely) known today as "multimedia" . Images of near photographic quality are now finding their way onto CD-ROM collections of images relating to a particular subject matter, and into application programs themselves, such as multimedia encyclopedias.
Technology marched on, and monitors supporting SVGA mode (768.times.1024 pixels) are now commonly available. Users have fallen in love with the power and pizzazz of multimedia, and want to display as many images as possible. The problem is that an SVGA image takes up a tremendous amount of storage space, and can take a considerable amount of computer processing power to generate. It is not uncommon for even high powered computers to take several seconds or even minutes to generate a single image. Many users find this response time unacceptable, since they are used to subsecond response time commonly achieved in the much simpler world of text processing. Storing every image the user could possibly want to display on a high speed storage medium would be nice in theory, but lacks practicability due to the multitude of ways a single image can be displayed (rotated, scaled, reverse image, etc), to the variation in the capabilities of individual displays, and to the massive amount of storage required to even contemplate such a thing.
For now, users feel a sense of frustration. They see that this amazingly powerful multimedia technology is just outside their grasp, due to the inefficient manner in which high quality images are currently being generated. This failure has resulted in a shared hesitancy among both users and application developers to fully adopt and embrace this new technology.